The present invention relates generally to business-to-business marketing services, and more particularly, to a method, system, and storage medium for providing supplier branding services over a communications network.
Many businesses have recently begun opening up their system firewalls to receive email messages from external sources. While there are obvious advantages in allowing outside information into a business, the reported inundation of unsolicited information has often resulted in overburdened system storage devices, diminished processing speeds, and sometimes overwhelmed system users. Accumulating junk mail (e.g., spam) can quickly consume system resources in a given network, slowing down the users' ability to retrieve important information which can further lead to diminished productivity as users sift through this sea of information
An increasing number of companies are beginning to implement enterprise portals for their employees, including personalized home pages similar to MY YAHOO™ in the public domain. Portals are World Wide Web (WWW) sites that are used as a starting point for users upon connecting to the web or are WWW sites that users visit as an anchor site upon connecting to the web. A portal may be set as a default homepage for users who employ a browser program that includes the homepage. Enterprise portals make it possible for employees to become more productive, by filtering out unwanted information and organizing the barrage of electronic data that inundate their desks each day. However, for suppliers faced with the challenge of one-to-one marketing (e.g., marketing engineering, design, purchasing, production control, logistics, etc.) with the employees of this type of customer organization, these enterprise portals provide both a challenge and a unique opportunity for suppliers to provide branded and timely messages to targeted constituencies within the customer organization. Customer employees could benefit by receiving tailored information to assist them in doing their jobs more effectively.
Recently, Industry Exchanges (IE), (e.g., Covisint™, Transora™, etc.), have been established as trusted third-party systems that facilitate information exchange, particularly for the buyer or customer side. Covisint™ is a business-to-business (B2B) exchange geared toward the automobile industry. It provides product development, procurement, and supply chain management collaboration capabilities for its members via a web-architected information portal. Transora™ is a similar system geared toward the consumer packaged goods industry. Currently, there are no known solutions that provide and manage supplier-branded marketing and related services to targeted constituencies within a customer organization utilizing information exchanges.
The above discussed and other drawbacks and deficiencies of the prior art are overcome or alleviated by the supplier branding tool of the invention.